Professor Arc

Chapter 46

It was the second day of the Vytal Festival and Jaune was elbow deep in a small pile of books. The library was just about abandoned, most of the students having decided to eschew the school in favour of Amity and the various stalls, games and such there. Although yesterday had technically been the first day of the Festival, it hadn't marked the beginning of the tournament. That was in a couple of hours and he'd need to be there beforehand to prepare with Peter. Most of yesterday had been festivities, speeches and a general chance for the people of Vale – and visitors from the other Kingdoms – to enjoy themselves and have fun. There had been a drawing ceremony the day before, however, just for the first round and to show who would be in what brackets and such.

A great sigh escaped him as he slumped back into his seat. The words on the page had started to blur together, and not because they held some arcane script. One hand came up to massage the bridge of his nose and he desperately wished he had something at hand to drink. Then again, commentating while drunk was probably a bad idea. How did Bran manage being drunk all the time?

No, that was a bad question – Jaune knew exactly how he managed it. What he wanted to know was how the bastard got away with it.

The morning had been an early one, up at six by virtue of Neo shaking him awake and showing off a curious new disguise. Cinder had called her in from what he could gather, which meant he'd soon get to find out just which set of students belonged to her. That should have been a good thing, except for the fact that they'd basically managed to sneak all the way through already.

He'd been in the library for the past four hours or so now, buried in obscure fairy tales and folklore in a desperate attempt to understand Roman's clue.

It hadn't gone well.

"A power that can be transferred," he sighed, one eye fixed balefully on the book he'd been reading. "Why is it that those words sounded so useful a day ago...?"

It wasn't like there was a book on transferable fairy tale powers, and in fact the time he'd put into researching fairy tales had only gone to show just how many there were. There were kid's fairy tales, which he'd started with, then there were ancient ones, lost ones, adapted ones, fairy tales which changed every now and then – and did that even include folklore, both now and before the foundation of the Kingdoms?

Jaune gripped his head between his hands and lowered it onto the table. The wood was cool against his forehead.

"Problems, sir?"

He almost jumped. At any other time he'd have heard a person approach, which was probably a bad sign of how paranoid he'd become, but lost in books and nursery rhymes – he hadn't heard a thing. Lie Ren stood nearby, a polite smile on his face as he looked down on the beleaguered teacher. Jaune blinked twice and sighed. "You don't have to call me sir."

"Sorry Jaune," the boy chuckled, "Still, I'm surprised to see you here. Doesn't the tournament start in a little over three hours?"

"I'm headed there in twenty minutes or so. I'm more surprised you're here. Shouldn't you and your team be enjoying the festivities?"

Ren grimaced, the expression out of place on the normally laid-back teen's face. He took a seat at the table and lowered himself down with an almost elderly wince. "Nora had us all out training this morning," he explained when he caught Jaune's quizzical eyes. "She's perhaps the cruellest taskmaster you've ever met. Pyrrha and she might have the energy to go shopping and playing games afterwards, but not all of us do."

"And so you escaped to the one place you knew would be empty on festival day," Jaune quipped.

Ren shrugged but didn't disagree. In truth, Jaune could sympathise. He often felt like the most overworked member of the faculty, despite that honour undoubtedly going to his girlfriend. Glynda simple handled it all better and still managed to come out of a six-hour marking session looking fresh... he supposed that made him Ren and her Nora in the student's analogy.